Is the BLM practicing unsafe CX?

More than 6,000 drilling permits issued under questionable provision

No, categorical exclusions are not symptoms of a venereal disease.
Rather, CXs, as they’re known, are provisions of the Energy Policy Act
of 2005, designed to streamline permitting for relatively harmless,
small-scale oil and gas activities — a single new gas well on an
existing well-pad, say. But soon after the law passed, the Bureau of
Land Management, which administers most oil and gas development in the
West, began to use CXs a lot — giving rise to worries that large-scale
drilling was moving forward in a scattershot fashion without thorough
environmental review. Now, the results of an investigation by the
Government Accountability Office suggest that those fears were
justified. About 6,100 permits to drill — 28 percent of the total
handled by the BLM — were issued with CXs from 2006 through 2008.
Partly due to poor oversight and partly because of the law’s confusing
language, the GAO found that the CXs were applied inconsistently, and violations were
common. Although most violations were technicalities, the GAO wrote,
others “may have thwarted (the National Environmental Policy Act)’s
twin aims of ensuring that BLM and the public are fully informed of the
environmental consequences of BLM’s actions. Click here for the full story and two-page graphic.